Burnout isn't new: 18th‑century farm records show workers describing the same exhaustion Sadie Harley Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Chief Editor Nearly 40% of Canadian workers say they feel burned out often or always, according to a 2025 survey by Mental Health Research Canada and Canada Life. The term has become part of a broader lexicon of modern work, alongside quiet quitting, hustle culture and grindset and "taskmasking." But burnout is older than this current moment of concern suggests. The World Health Organization first classified it in 1990, in the International Classification of Diseases, defining it as "a state of vital exhaustion." The WHO later redefined the term as a syndrome "resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed," characterized by feelings of exhaustion, detachment and a lack of accomplishment.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word itself to 1937, but the term is even older than that. More than 200 years ago, agriculturalists and workers used the phrase "burned out" to describe fertilizer kilns, fuel, matches, fires and the consequences of excessive work. The phrase 'burned out' is centuries old Writing in his 1771 travelog The Farmer's Tour Through the East of England, agriculturalist Arthur Young documented farmers pushed to physical and emotional collapse by relentless work.

For instance, he tells the story of a subtenant farmer, William White. White worked hard to master new irrigation techniques and climbed from "a day laborer to a little farmer" despite having been "twice burned out, by which accident he lost a hundred pounds, notwithstanding the uncommon industry of repairing his buildings with his own hands." In other words, White's barn burned down twice. He couldn't stop farming while rebuilding it, which meant he was working much harder than before, to the point where he lost 100 pounds.

In Young's account, "burned out" joins material destruction with "vital exhaustion," and "uncommon industry" with accomplishment. Here, burnout has both a material and a social basis—material because a barn burning down necessitates extra work, and social because workers were expected, if not compelled, to do extra work and were supposedly rewarded for it with status and stories. From literal to figurative Burnout's meaning shifted from literal to figurative over time.

It began as a description of candles burning out or fuel being used up, then shifted to a barn burning down and a worker's energy or body being depleted in the rebuilding. Eventually, it came to simply describe a worker's exhaustion. This change creates an analogy, or even an identity, between objects and workers.

This change is figurative because this kind of identity is a metaphor: "Workers are fuel." We typically associate metaphor with imagination or rhetorical flourish. But philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that "most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical." Metaphorical concepts structure "what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people." Because we rely on them for everyday activities, they aren't necessarily obvious.